Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Papers offered to Adriana Belletti

238 Pages·2014·2.26 MB·English

Internet Celebration for
th
Adriana Belletti 60 Birthday

Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and
Language Acquisition.
Papers offered to Adriana Belletti.

Edited by
Carla Contemori and Lena Dal Pozzo

CISCL PRESS
ISBN 9788890794322

Centro di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio, Università di Siena
Complesso S. Niccolò, Via Roma, 56
I-53100 Siena, Italy
Carla Contemori & Lena Dal Pozzo (eds)
Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition.
Papers offered to Adriana Belletti.

CISCL PRESS
via Roma 56 – 53100 SIENA, Italy
www.ciscl.unisi.it

ISBN 9788890794322
This e-book collects a number of contributions written in honour of Adriana
Belletti. The contributors are some of Adriana's colleagues and former
students representative of a wider community, who have been part of CISCL’s
inspiring community, either as students or visiting scholars.

Content

Noga Balaban and Naama Friedmann 6
Disentangling responses to WH-questions: TOM and syntactic abilities

Giulia Bianchi 15
Gender in L2 German

Giuliano Bocci and Lucia Pozzan 28
Questions (and experimental answers) about Italian subjects.
Subject positions in main and indirect question in L1, attrition and L2

Irene Franco 45
Effects of parametric change and active/inactive alignment: the case
of C-omission

Mara Frascarelli and Francesca Ramaglia 74
Split Nominal Constructions in Italian

Anna Gavarró and Noemí Fortón 97
Person features and the acquisition of Clitics

Richard Kayne 114
Once and Twice

Vincenzo Moscati 130
Eliciting clitics in French: against the Generalized Null Object Stage

Keiko Murasugi 145
Ne-attachment (Ne-tuke) on the Truncated Sentences

Marco Nicolis 157
Clausal extraposition and syntactic doubling: pro-legomena

Jacopo Garzonio and Cecilia Poletto 182
The negative marker that escaped the cycle: some notes on manco

Emilio Servidio 198
Polarity particles in interrogative tags
Maria Vender, Maria Teresa Guasti, 217
Maria Garraffa and Antonella Sorace
Bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment:
Similarities and Differences

Marit Westergaard, Antonella Sorace, 229
Caroline Heycock and Kristine Bentzen
Variable verb placement in embedded clauses:
comparing English and Norwegian children
Foreword

LUIGI RIZZI

University of Geneva, University of Siena
[email protected]

This electronic volume collects papers dedicated to Adriana Belletti on her 60th
birthday. With this and other parallel initiatives, former students and colleagues close
to her want to honor and thank Adriana for her long-standing contributions to
linguistics, and for her personal dedication and friendship.

Ever since the late 1970’s Adriana’s research has profoundly influenced central
themes of theoretical syntax, such as the study of case, unaccusativity and other verb
classes, of subject positions, agreement, clitics and doubling constructions; her work
on the positions of verbs in the inflectional structures was an important source of
inspiration for the subsequent cartographic projects, which she successively
contributed to with influential analyses of the peripheries of the clause, and of the
interface between syntax and discourse organization. More recently, Adriana’s work
on the acquisition of A’-constructions, clitics and interface properties has contributed
in a decisive manner to constitute and consolidate the trend of theoretically inspired
experimental linguistics.

Adriana has played a key role in the constitution of an internationally visible pole of
formal linguistics at the University of Siena. She brought all her qualities to the task,
as a researcher and as a teacher. Adriana was one of the founding members of the
Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul Linguaggio (CISCL), and has
directed many doctoral dissertations in about ten years of life of the doctoral program
in Cognitive Sciences of the University of Siena, and in the Florence-Siena doctoral
consortium. She has supervised about one hundred undergraduate theses at the MA
and BA levels, and has directed for many years the MA degree in Linguistics and
cognitive studies. Her dedication to the students of all levels is proverbial in Siena. A
very visible sign is the formidable crowd of students which gathers in the corridor in
front of her office in the days of reception; this has almost become a social event, in
which students even come ahead of time to have the opportunity to chat on their
research themes and exchange their experiences with other students while waiting in
line. These unusual discussion groups give a perceptible image of the sense of a
community that Adriana has managed to build.
Adriana’s research and teaching has inspired many in Siena, in Geneva, and
elsewhere in the world of linguistic studies. This electronic volume is a sign of
gratitude for her hard work, ideas, achievements over many decades, and a heart-felt
wish for her future projects.
Disentangling responses to Wh-questions:
TOM and syntactic abilities

NOGA BALABAN & NAAMA FRIEDMANN

Tel Aviv University

1. Introduction
Several different abilities are involved in answering a Wh question like "Which
linguist did the conference attendees celebrate birthday for?". Among them are the
syntactic ability to understand who did what to whom in a sentence that involves Wh-
movement and intervention, and the ability to convey the response in a way that the
person who asked the question would be able to identify the reference of the answer.
Correspondingly, the answer "Adriana Belletti" would be correct, but an answer that
reveals that the hearer thought that the linguist is celebrating a birthday to the
conference attendees would be incorrect for syntactic reasons: the Wh dependency
caused confusion as to the agent and theme in the question. A different type of
response – "she" or "the linguist who draws syntactic trees" would also be
inappropriate, but for other reasons: such response reflects a ToM (Theory of Mind)
difficulty, causing inability to provide an answer that would allow the person who
asked the question to identify the person referred to in the response.
In more detail, the syntactic operation that takes place in Wh-questions is a
movement of the Wh- phrase from its original position in either subject or object
position to the specifier node of the complement phrase (spec-CP). This movement
(i.e., A’ movement/ wh-movement) places the Wh-phrase in the beginning of the
sentence. (Chomsky, 1981; Rizzi, 1990). Importantly, there is a crucial difference
between subject and object wh-questions. In subject-questions the moving of the wh-
phrase does not create any change in the canonical order of the sentence constituents,
it remains SVO (in English, for example, as well as in Hebrew, the language under
investigation in the current study), and the subject does not cross any other DP it is
movement (Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, 2009; Belletti & Rizzi, 2009; Belletti &
Contemori, 2010). In object questions the Wh dependency includes intervention, as
the moved object crosses the subject.
Difficulty in comprehending and producing object movement that crosses the
subject is characteristic of syntactic impairment in various populations: children with
© Copyright 2014 Noga Balaban and Naama Friedmann
Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Papers offered to Adriana Belletti.
C. Contemori and L. Dal Pozzo (eds.) Siena, CISCL Press.
Disentangling responses to Wh-questions: Balaban & Friedmann
TOM and syntactic abilities
Syntactic-SLI (Specific Language Impairment, Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004,
2007, 2011; Novogrodsky & Friedmann, 2006), children with hearing impairment
that are orally trained (Friedmann & Szterman, 2006, 2011; Friedmann & Haddad-
Hanna, 2014), and patients with agrammatic aphasia (Friedmann, 2001, 2006;
Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, & Drai, 1999).
Wh-questions place a different kind of demand on the ToM ability of the
replier. The TOM task that wh-questions pose is to tailor an answer that meets the
informational requirement of the hearer. In other words, when asked "Which linguist
did the conference attendees celebrate birthday for?" an appropriate answer would be
to name an attribute that is both unique to the intended referent and is familiar to the
person asking the question. The answer “likes to draw syntactic trees” is infelicitous
because many linguists share this feature (definitely all linguists who attend a
cartography conference), and the answer “she” can only be felicitous if both the
conversers were standing near the intended referent and the speaker would be
gesturing towards her (Ariel, 1990; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). TOM impairment
occurs in various populations, most notably in people after right hemisphere brain
damage (Apperly, 2011; Balaban, Friedmann, Ariel, & Ziv, submitted; Happé,
Brownell, Winner, 1999; Penn, 1999; Sabbagh, 1999; Saxe & Powell, 2006; Saxe &
Wexler, 2005; Tompkins, 2012) and individuals with autism (Baron-Cohen, Leslie,
Frith, 1985; Baron-Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, & Cohen, 1993; Frith, 1989; Taylor,
2012).
In the current study our aim was to disentangle these syntactic ability and the
TOM ability involved in answering a Wh question. We assume that participants who
have difficulty in considering the informational requirements of wh-questions will
produce errors that reflect their inability to consider their conversation partner’s point
of view and provide answers that do not allow appropriate identification of the
intended referent. TOM impairment can be selective, so TOM abilities can be
impaired without syntactic impairment. Therefore, we do not expect that TOM
impaired participants will produce syntactic errors. According to this view, ToM
impairment is distinct from a grammatical impairment (Apperly, 2011, Blake, 2006,
2007; Johns, Tooley, & Traxler, 2008) but may affect language production and
comprehension (Balaban, Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, submitted; Belletti, 2008).
We explored this disentangling approach in this study with people who suffered right
brain damage and were found to have aTOMia, a TOM impairment (Apperly, 2011;
Blake, 2006, 2007; Gallagher, Happé, Brunswick, Fletcher, Frith, & Frith, 2000;
Happé, et al., 1999; Martín-Rodríguez, & León-Carrión, 2010; Winner, Brownell,
Happé, & Blum, 1998). The question we ask in the current study is whether these
patients, as speakers, show a reduced ability to represent their hearers' mind and
therefore show difficultly in choosing the appropriate differentiating feature in
accordance to its accessibility in the mind of their hearer, while retaining their
syntactic abilities.
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Inquiries into Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. CISCL, Siena
Papers offered to Adriana Belletti
The rationale was that if aTOMic patients (patients that show a ToM impairment)
produce infelicitous answers to wh-questions even though their syntactic
understanding is intact, we could infer that this ability is dependent, partly, upon the
consideration of others' point of view. On the other hand, if these patients are able,
despite their aTOMia, to provide appropriate informative relevant answers this would
lead to the conclusion that only syntactic knowledge is responsible for this. This
approach was tailored to the aim of disentangling the grammatical aspects from the
TOM related aspects of wh-question understanding (for more on this disentangling
approach see Balaban, Friedmann, Belletti, & Rizzi, submitted).

2. Participants
A group of 17 right-hemisphere brain damaged patients took part in the study, 6 of
them female and 11 male (See Table 1 for a detailed description of the participants'
background). Their mean age was 49;1 years (ranging between 25-64 years SD =
10.9). Sixteen of the participants were native Hebrew speakers. One spoke the
language for more than 55 years (Dror, since 1950). Sixteen of the patients suffered
one incident of CVA in their right hemisphere. One patient was surgically treated for
removal of parieto-frontal-temporal tumor (Sachar). Ten of the participants suffered
left hemispatial neglect, a neurological phenomenon characterized by difficulty to
attend to the left side of the visual field. Two participants had hemianopia, a loss of
visual ability to half of the visual field (Sigalit and Tzvi). All the participants were
tested at least 2 months post their brain damage. A control group of 6 non brain
damaged adults was also tested. Their mean age was 51;3 years (ranging between 27-
66 years SD = 15.8. The aTOMic battery, a comprehensive test of Theory of Mind,
was administered to all the participants. The battery included items testing eight
categories of TOM, two items per category: first order false belief, 2nd order false
belief, understanding knowledge gaps, understanding scenarios in which teaching
was initiated, understanding white lies, embarrassing social situations, and cartoons
(Balaban et al., 2008). Ten of the right-hemisphere damaged participants had a severe
aTOMia, ToM deficit, their scores in the aTOMic battery ranging between 27%-68%
correct. Seven other participants had normal TOM: 3 scored 100%, 3 scored 95% and
one 85% correct. The control group of scored between 95%-100% (this battery has a
large body of healthy adults control data, Balaban et al., submitted A).

Table 1: Participant’s background
8
Disentangling responses to Wh-questions: Balaban & Friedmann
TOM and syntactic abilities

3. Material and procedure
Twenty pictures were presented, each picture included three figures: two of the same
type (e.g., two giraffes) and a third figure of a different kind (e.g., a girl). In each
picture, the first figure was performing an action on the second, and the second figure
was performing the same action on the third figure, which was of the same type of the
first one (see Figure 1).
Importantly, the two figures of the same kind differed in at least one feature.
For example, when two giraffes were presented, one was tall and one short; in the
picture with two elephants, one was purple and the other blue.
We asked two which questions about each picture, a subject (1) and an object
question (2).

(1) Eize girafa modedet et ha-yalda?
Which giraffe measures ACC the-girl?
Which giraffe is measuring the girl?
(2) Et eize girafa ha-yalda modedet?
ACC which giraffe the-girl measures?
Which giraffe the girl is measuring?

9